Saturday, February 20, 2010

Consequences of Globalization

I was watching C-SPAN 2 in the middle of the night last week and enjoyed the following talk by Barry C. Lynn an economist, senior fellow at the New America Foundation think tank in Washington, D.C., and author of "Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction". He is also the author of End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation" and "Piety & Politics: The Right-Wing Assault on Religious Freedom".

This guy is so right on. During this economic downturn where our country is suffering from high unemployment, Mr. Lynn explained that Monopolies are bad for jobs. For all their promise of efficiency, consolidation of power and business eliminates jobs as well as makes us less free, and less self-sufficient. He says that since Reagan and Clinton, the US citizen has been transformed into a "consumer."

Lynn identified the two major influences that have lead to our current globalists economy. Robert Bork who was nominated for the Supreme Court by Reagan went to law School at the University of Chicago and is best known for writing The Antitrust Paradox, a book in which he argued that consumers are often beneficiaries of corporate mergers, and that many legal interpretations of antitrust laws hurt consumers.

The second is Milton Friedman of the Chicago school of economics who wrote the book "Capitalism and Freedom". Milton Friedman is considered the father of western economics and his book "Capitalism and Freedom" is considered the Bible. Friedman is quoted has saying that a company should have no "social responsibility" to the public or society because its only concern is to increase profits for itself and for its shareholders.

The problem with this view is that businesses often looks for short-term profits at the expense of ethics and social responsibility, and this shortsightedness leads to a loss of faith in our institutions and businesses and a need for stronger central government to regulate business and protect the public.